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Trimming the Tree’s Genes

Bell’s Christmas Tree Farm, in upstate New York.Credit
Randy Harris for The New York Times

PUYALLUP, Wash.

A SEVEN-FOOT evergreen will bear 350,000 needles, more or less. And if Gary Chastagner has his way this holiday season, precious few of them will end up on the parlor floor.

As a plant pathologist at Washington State University, Dr. Chastagner, 64, heads one of the nation’s half-dozen Christmas tree research labs.

He could presumably use the authority of his post to settle the age-old debate on whether candy canes should face right or left. Yet recent months have found Dr. Chastagner frittering away his time on a multistate, $1.3-million RNA-sequencing trial instead. By sampling trees that he has tested for needle retention, Dr. Chastagner and his colleagues hope to discover the genes associated with shedding.

You may have noticed that Christmas sales now seem to pop up at the mall just a few days after the Fourth of July. Partly as a result of this calendar shift, about a quarter of this year’s Christmas tree purchases will come from a species called “artificial,” according to market research from the National Christmas Tree Association.

This is where Dr. Chastagner’s latest research comes in. “It’s probably the largest single-funded Christmas tree project in U.S. history,” he said, sitting in his cluttered office. “Some people in the public would ask, ‘Why would we spend money on this?’ Well, the Christmas tree industry is a $1 billion industry.”

The tree trade group estimates that some 15,000 farms and plantations will sell more than 30 million trees this year. Perhaps a quarter of these will come from 10- or 15-acre farms that use basic management techniques and primitive equipment, said Dennis Tompkins, an arborist who edited the American Christmas Tree Journal for almost two decades. The largest and most sophisticated of operations will harvest almost a million trees a year from an 8,500-acre plantation and remove them by helicopter.

For 32 years, Dr. Chastagner has conducted much of the most important research into Christmas-tree cultivation. He has examined Phytophthora root rot and the Swiss needle cast — both pernicious conifer scourges. And he has carefully analyzed the optimal shape and volume of a Christmas tree stand.

In 2007, Dr. Chastagner published the definitive peer-reviewed paper on whether you can successfully hydrate a Christmas tree with an IV drip. (Quick answer: save it for Santa.)

“Gary Chastagner has just been unbelievable in terms of his long-term contributions to the industry,” Mr. Tompkins said. “We’re really lucky to have him.”

The locus of these important efforts, it turns out, is a concrete-block outbuilding, half-bunkered into a hillock. Dr. Chastagner calls it the Dungeon. “We’re standing in an old cistern that was not being used,” he said. “One of us talked about putting a racquetball court in here.”

Inside the Dungeon stood tables stacked with wire-and-wood racks. Each rack held hundreds of cut conifer branches — perhaps 5,000 in all — sticking up from their cells like quills in a dry inkwell. The whole open chamber was redolent with the stench of Christmas (or the fragrance, if you prefer).

This week’s samples of Fraser fir had arrived by express mail from John Frampton, a forestry geneticist at North Carolina State University. The broader project involved evaluating the mother trees for growth rate and habit, date of bud break, disease resistance and consumer preference.

Today’s experiment, however, was so particular as to seem monomaniacal. A solitary technician, Kathy Riley, was counting the needles that fell off each and every branch in the giant room.

Ms. Riley plucked an eight-inch-long sample from the rack and rubbed her bare fingers up and down the stems from the last two years’ worth of growth. Her palms were coated in resin.

Then, like a bingo caller, she intoned a pair of numbers: a percentage estimate of the needles that had ended up on the floor, based on a scale from one to seven. A data entry assistant plugged these numbers into a spreadsheet that appeared awesome in its size and breathtaking in its tedium.

Dr. Chastagner pointed to a few of the almost naked branches, which had porcupined their needles. “You see some pretty poor needle retention,” he said. “Also some winners, some with almost no needle loss.”

Both types of samples were useful. What the RNA detectives hoped to find was the single nucleotide polymorphism, or the variation, that controlled needle drop. One plant would have it and another wouldn’t. Scientists could employ this information to develop a genomic field test. Then cone collectors in wild forests or managed stands might quickly screen a tree before harvesting seed stock to sell to Christmas tree growers.

Photo

A Colorado Blue Spruce.Credit
Randy Harris for The New York Times

Ultimately, breeders could try to nurture a whole seed orchard of superior trees. But those maturing plants wouldn’t form cones and set seed for 30 years, Dr. Chastagner said. As if the run-up to Christmas weren’t long enough already.

THE annals of Yuletide will probably never reveal who felled the first Christmas tree. But it seems safe to say that it wasn’t someone concerned with single nucleotide polymorphic markers or helicopter harvesting.

In his short and entertaining new history, “Inventing the Christmas Tree,” the German writer Bernd Brunner traces the tree’s roots to the 12th or 13th century, and a traditional Christmas Eve pageant called the paradise play.

Performed for the unlettered, this skit retold “the original story of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden,” Mr. Brunner said over Skype, from his apartment in Istanbul. “And there was a green tree of paradise,” a stage prop that would have been decorated with apples and communion wafers.

By the 15th and 16th centuries, the Christmas tree began to appear in the records of Mitteleuropean trade guilds. But it did not become instantly ubiquitous. Only an 18th-century aristocrat, Mr. Brunner suggested, could spare an entire room for the frivolous display of a tree.

The tree’s reception in the Puritanical quarters of the United States was frosty, he writes. As late as 1883, one nameless lifestyle reporter described the Christmas tree as a passing fad. Christmas stockings would soon make a comeback!

“The German Christmas tree — a rootless and lifeless corpse — was never worthy of the day,” the trend article said. (The newspaper, by the way, was The New York Times.)

Until the 1970s, the Christmas tree found its way into the American household in a haphazard fashion, said the journal editor Dennis Tompkins. “Wild culture,” he added, was the rule. Enterprising loggers would trek into the forests and haul to market whatever they found. On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, this usually meant a rough-and-ready Douglas fir. The Catskills or Nova Scotia might yield spruce or balsam fir.

Yet the newly cleared woods did not grow back the same way. In the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Chastagner said, previously shaded understory plants like salal and huckleberry celebrated their Christmas good fortune by “going crazy,” and evergreens that made it through the tangle developed stunted lower branches.

Even for tree farmers who cleared the brush, natural regeneration proved a hard force to tame. Some conifers succeeded too well. The tree’s leader, or growth shoot, would muddle along for a year or two. Then, perhaps during a wet summer, it would leap up two feet. This type of open layering would probably satisfy only the German immigrant (or casual pyromaniac) who still fixed candles onto the branches.

The solution represented what might be the first horticultural innovation of the Christmas tree trade. “They would take a knife, and at the bottom of the leader, they would cut into the edges,” Dr. Chastagner said. The idea was “you would disrupt the flow of nutrients and water into these buds that are going to develop. And they’re not going to grow as vigorously.”

The managed Christmas tree plantations of the 1950s and ’60s weren’t necessarily raising showpieces, either. A 1964 Cornell University survey found that more than half the plantation-grown trees were unsalable.

Many trees and seed cones were leftovers from timber stands. There, lumber companies preferred fast-growing trunks with few of the lateral branches that produce knots in boards. Where to hang all the Christmas balls remained a mystery beyond the scope of science.

A FINE place to witness how the Christmas tree has evolved is Ken and JoAnn Scholz’s Snowshoe Evergreen. The 350-acre operation lies just down the road from Dr. Chastagner’s office, and he drove over in a university-issue Chevy Blazer.

When the couple started in the business 40 years ago, “You bought seed from whoever,” said Mr. Scholz, 67. “It was all in wild collections.”

The couple continues to operate a choose-and-cut lot and sells other trees to retailers. But Mr. Scholz does most of his volume as a contract seedling grower.

Nowadays, Christmas tree farmers typically choose seed from a specialist, who ships it directly to a forestry corporation like Weyerhaeuser. Here, the conifers will germinate into inch-tall plants called plugs.

Mr. Scholz and his team of 18 workers then transplant the finger-high conifers on their farm. A few years later, Snowshoe will deliver them to a distant plantation, where they will reach maturity. The whole rotation, from seed to Christmas tree stand, may take 8 to 12 years.

The volume is incredible. “Each of these beds has 17,000 or 18,000 plants,” Mr. Scholz said — nothing special, he insisted. He pointed to the fields he stocked a month ago, in rows that stretch a quarter-mile. “Let’s put it this way: we just put in 1.7 million.”

Photo

Gary Chastagner is the head of a Christmas tree lab at Washington State University.Credit
Randy Harris for The New York Times

Up close, the grid of little green twigs had the immaculately ordered appearance of needlepoint. One advanced North Carolina grower (“I’d rather not tell you who,” Mr. Scholz said) had supplied him with a special selection of Fraser fir.

Check out the tops, he said, and you’ll see a whorl of five buds instead of the typical three or four. In a year, he might lift the entire planting, bed by bed, sort and grade the seedlings, and re-transplant them with a more generous spacing.

Before then, he’ll fumigate the ground with a mix of methyl bromide and chloropicrin to control weeds and stave off pathogens. Tens of thousands of plants could be spoiled by a handful of infected seedlings. “It’s almost a must in this business,” Mr. Scholz said. “There’s so much I can’t control, like the weather. If someone is entrusting me to grow plants for them, I’ve got to use best practices.”

The National Christmas Tree Association likes to tout the environmental benefits of buying “real,” carbon-based trees instead of polyvinyl chloride replicants. Be that as it may, a Christmas tree plantation is decidedly not an organic farm.

Dr. Chastagner has conducted some preliminary research into organic growing practices, experimenting with a variety of natural weed blockers.

How big, then, is the organic Christmas tree market?

He answered without hesitation: “It doesn’t even register.”

WHEN customers imagine a Christmas tree grower, they are probably picturing someplace like Bell’s Christmas Tree Farm, at the foot of the Catskills, a dozen miles west of New Paltz.

Gordon Bell and his wife, Paula, live in a 1700s farmhouse at one end of the property, and their son and daughter-in-law, Brian and Lori Bell, recently built a home across the way. There is still a red milking barn and stone walls that crisscross the land, remnants of a three-generation dairy. The “U-cut” season starts the day after Thanksgiving and closes around noon on Christmas Eve. Santa Claus typically drops by each season to address his public.

The tree farm started almost as a lark, said Brian, 38.

Mr. Bell, 66, agreed: “We didn’t know the first thing when we started this. Smart people take classes and learn what to do. We put trees in the ground and then started learning.”

On a cool morning not long ago that was either the end of summer or the beginning of fall, the Bell family piled into a green John Deere Gator utility vehicle and headed up Blitzen Boulevard to look at some trees. In Mr. Bell’s estimation, their Fraser and balsam firs have shown “exceptional needle retention.” Yet extreme weather (which Brian said could also be called routine weather) is hard on the Frasers.

“They need to be on great drainage,” his father said. “But they need water. Figure out that one.”

The Bells have been trying to master the quirks of at least a dozen other varieties, some traditional, others exotic imports. The top of the Korean fir grows crookedly if you fertilize the plant. And the handsome Turkish fir seemed to be participating in a work slowdown.

“There are so many small things that people would never think of that make a big difference,” Mr. Bell said. “How they’re trimmed, the spacing, the origin of the seed, the amount of time, the upkeep to get them to be a salable tree.”

Brian, who shears each tree twice a year, agreed: “If you have to take care of a tree for 10 to 15 years, there’s just no profit in it.”

Still, the farm has been a wholehearted success in the sense that it allows the Bells to stay on the land and limit their property tax. “We didn’t have to sell part of the property for a housing development,” Brian said.

Mr. Bell turned left down Dancer Drive in the little cart, with Brian and Lori rattling around in back. In one full circuit, he can observe 28,000 pines and spruces and firs, trees with every possible trait. Lori, 38, has some affection for the blue spruces, an old regional favorite. The needles will perform violence on her hands while she’s pruning, but the sturdy branches can support even the heaviest (and tackiest) of ornaments. And they’re virtually cat-proof. “You look out there, and 9 out of every 10 are perfect,” she said.

Brian likes the scent of a Canaan fir, he said. But, in truth, the Bells can’t afford to be sentimental about a conical shrub. It’s the customer who looks at a well-groomed conifer and sees a Christmas tree.

A seedling costs 80 cents, Brian explained. And every U-cut tree on the lot, whatever the size, sells for $43. His concern is making sure that nothing goes wrong in between.

If you really want to know how a Christmas tree farmer picks his own tree, Mr. Bell is happy to share.

“Whatever we have that’s in the way of the mower,” he said. “That’s what goes into the house.”

Correction: December 27, 2012

An article on Dec. 6 about genetic research to grow Christmas trees that will retain their needles longer misidentified the source of market research indicating how many of this year’s Christmas tree purchases were expected to come from a species known as “artificial,” and it misstated the proportion of those purchases. The research was done by the National Christmas Tree Association, not by the American Christmas Tree Association. And the proportion of “artificial” purchases was projected to be about one-quarter of all tree sales, not one-third. The article also misstated the number of trees that were expected to be sold by some 15,000 farms and plantations this year. It was more than 30 million, not more than 20 million.

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2012, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trimming the Tree’s Genes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe